Stories

The Red Dirt Ruby Conference is happening in Oklamona City on May 6th and 7th. Jacob Swanner and Gregg Pollack will be there teaching a Rails 3 tutorial, and if you'd like to join us it's not too late to grab a ticket.

Ubuntu 10.4 was released yesterday and Jan Lelis wrote up a couple of RubyBuntu tutorials which contain all the information you need to get Ruby and Rails running smoothly along with command line and IDE tips.

Earlier this week Lee Jarvis released Cinch, an IRC Microframework for quickly creating IRC bots in Ruby. Cinch is definitely worth a look if just for it’s simplicity. It even allows you to specify named parameters when you define the words your bot responds to, kinda like Sinatra.

The arel library from Rails 3 gives us a great new syntax for creating queries. Under the covers arel converts your where conditions into sql is by using something called a PredicateBuilder. Ernie Miller recently put out a plugin called MetaWhere that takes advantage of these PredicateBuilders to give arel even more functionality.

When you’re working in a language as object oriented as Ruby, it can often get confusing when people start talking about the object model. If you find yourself trying to understand the object model of a class, perhaps one which has lots of parent classes, then it might be time to use a little known library called DrX. DrX is an object inspector that uses the Tk user interface toolkit and GraphViz to give you beautiful diagrams of all the classes, modules and singletons from a given class.

Adam Wiggins recently moved to using the Beanstalk background processor. In this article he talks about why he prefers Beanstalk over delayed_job and RabbitMQ, as well as introduces his new Ruby Beanstalk client, Stalker.

If you're a fan of the Panic status board, then you might dig Sonia, a blossoming open source version of an office dashboard by Piotr Usewicz. So far the dash has twitter, campfire, github, Icinga network monitoring, and london tube information. Mind the Gap.